Consumer Affairs has posted an expose of It’s Just Lunch, a match-making company that for a “modest” fee will listen to you gush forth your wildest dreams of dating a banker or a neurosurgeon and then hook you up with a salivating, dead-eyed landscaper at the local mental asylum. Here’s the link. Now here’s our take.

What a shock – people willing to spend nearly $2,000 to be hooked up with anonymous strangers officially sanctioned by the love making equivalent of a headhunter end up finding a lot of desperate losers swimming around the shallow end of their dating pool. We find ourselves a bit conflicted in our reaction to this story. On one hand, 2 grand (even to find true love) isn’t exactly chump change, and if these consumers aren’t getting what they paid for, IJL is precisely the kind of company we started up this blog to mercilessly flagellate. On the other – it’s very hard to get outraged when shallow, petty people who view love as a filled-in check list of pecuniary acquirements get burned.

Look, guys, it’s Valentine’s Day, so let the pimp junta over at The Consumerist tell you how to find love on the cheap. Every time you meet someone you find attractive, spark up a conversation and tell them so, bluntly if need be. Then ask them if they’d like to get to know you. If someone tells you no, well, who wants to be with someone who doesn’t find them attractive in return? You move on, confident that you’ve done some pruning. If they do, congratulations – you’ve found love. It’s not hard, as long as your loins can ooze over less than an x+1 figure salary and the prospect of vrooming about in a shiny new phallic symbol.

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